Nick Harding of Praesepe comments on the implementation of the £2 stake…."At midnight last night we finally went live with the changes to the operation of B3 machines. For the avoidance of doubt, this means that we can return, after four years, to the highly popular ‘Section 16’ prize-to-stake ratio of £2 stake / £500 maximum prize, and I am certain that our regular players will vote with their feet and move back to playing these games in AGC and Bingo Clubs, where their levels of comfort and general customer service are so much better than alternative venues!

At many of our venues, we went live at midnight as we had been planning the launch of these new games for some time and had already embedded the new game software in existing machines ready for the launch. This is mainly true of ‘Barcrest’ and ‘Blueprint’ machines which are either linked on-line to central servers that make it very easy to download software, or (in the case of Blueprint) have been delivered to our venues over the past week or so. Other machines will take longer to update, with software being delivered by engineers uploading from memory sticks or CD’s.”